Dr. Costantino Iadecola Wins Excellence Award in Hypertension Research

Dr. Costantino Iadecola, director of the Feil Family Brain and Mind Research Institute and the Anne Parrish Titzell Professor of Neurology, has won the 2015 Excellence Award for Hypertension Research from the American Heart Association's Council on Hypertension.

Dr. Costantino Iadecola

The accolade, sponsored by Novartis, is the council's most prestigious award and carries a $10,000 honorarium. It recognizes researchers' contributions to the field of hypertension that have led to improved treatment and a greater understanding of high blood pressure.

A neurobiologist and neurologist, Dr. Iadecola was honored for his research into the connection between hypertension and stroke and Alzheimer's disease. He discovered that blood vessels in the brain are uniquely and highly susceptible to the effects of hypertension. The resulting damage to the vessels may lead not only to stroke and vascular dementia, but also to an increased risk of developing Alzheimer's disease. Dr. Iadecola received the award at a reception on Sept. 18 during the American Heart Association's 2015 Hypertension Scientific Sessions in Washington, D.C. Dr. Iadecola also gave a lecture during the four-day conference.

"I am honored and humbled to have been selected for this award, which I am delighted to accept on behalf of my associates in the Feil Family Brain and Mind Research Institute who made the research possible," Dr. Iadecola said.

"This recognition has been typically bestowed on scientists working on the heart and blood vessels," he added. "Giving this award for research on the link between high blood pressure and Alzheimer's disease highlights the fact that the hypertension community worldwide acknowledges that the brain is a critical target of hypertension. This realization strengthens my resolve to continue this work, with the ultimate goal of developing new therapies to shield the brain from the devastating impact of hypertension."

Additional Awards and Honors

Dr. Wallace Carter, an associate professor of emergency medicine in clinical medicine and an adjunct associate professor of clinical medicine, received the Council of Emergency Medicine Residency Directors CORD Impact Award at its annual academic assembly on April 15 in Phoenix. The council is a scientific and educational organization focused on improving the quality of emergency medical care, enhancing the quality of emergency medicine instruction and encouraging communication between the faculty of various emergency medicine training programs. The Impact Award is given annually to faculty members who have made significant contributions toward those goals.

Dr. Marisa Censani, an assistant professor of pediatrics, was appointed to the Pediatric Endocrine Society's Obesity Committee for a three-year term, effective May 1. The society's mission is to advance the care of children and adolescents with endocrine disorders. The committee focuses on the problem of childhood and adolescent obesity caused, at least in part, by endocrine disorders.

Dr. Nikolaos Skubas, a professor of clinical anesthesiology and of anesthesiology in clinical cardiothoracic surgery, was elected into the Society of Cardiovascular Anesthesiologists Nominating Committee in May for a two-year term. The society is an international organization of anesthesiologists that promotes excellence in clinical care, education and research in the subspecialty.

Vascular dementia is one of the leading causes of age-related cognitive impairment, with its incidence expected to skyrocket as the baby boomer generation reaches its twilight years.

There are no known biomarkers of the disease, which is characterized by a decline in reasoning, planning, judgment and memory processes caused by inadequate blood flow to the brain. There are no diagnostic tests to screen patients for susceptibility prior to onset of symptoms, and no approved treatments or cures. All that's known today is that vascular dementia, closely related to Alzheimer's disease and often coexisting with it, is associated with cardiovascular risk factors such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes and smoking, as well as heart attacks and strokes.

To find new treatments for this devastating disease, it is vital to define the state-of-the art, pinpoint knowledge gaps and identify new opportunities for therapeutic development, writes Weill Cornell Medical College's Dr. Costantino Iadecola.

In an article published in the Nov. 20 issue of the journal Neuron, Dr. Iadecola reviewed the mechanisms of vascular dementia from the days of Alois Alzheimer in the early 1900s to modern-day understanding of the disease, providing a synthesis inclusive of basic science investigations, including work performed at Weill Cornell, and clinical studies.

"I was asked by the editors to highlight all of the different pathological processes leading to vascular dementia, including the recently identified contribution of pathogenic factors traditionally attributed to Alzheimer's disease, an area that we have pioneered here at Weill Cornell," said Dr. Iadecola, director of the Feil Family Brain and Mind Research Institute, the Anne Parrish Titzell Professor of Neurology and professor of neurology and neuroscience at Weill Cornell. "Through this analysis, unresolved questions were identified and a path for moving the field forward was charted."

With tests only able to conclusively diagnose vascular dementia after death, Dr. Iadecola and his team at the Feil Family Brain and Mind Research Institute are developing new biomarkers and identifying susceptibility genes to ultimately predict a patient's risk of developing the disease before the onset of symptoms — something not possible today.

"We are really committed to unraveling how neurovascular and neurometabolic diseases cause dementia," Dr. Iadecola said, "both from the basic science perspective and from the clinical side."

For Scott Runyon, attending Weill Cornell Medical College was a decision etched in the lines of a black and white photograph.

The young man in the photograph, poised and dapper, graduated from the same medical school nearly 50 years ago. He moved to Boston, started a family, and became a renowned orthopedic surgeon whose practice of medicine went far beyond simple diagnoses and treatments.

Runyon loves this photograph and finds inspiration in it. The image is of his father, Dr. Robert Chase Runyon, who instilled in him a commitment to compassionate patient care.

"If there was an institution that gave him the sense of altruism and integrity that he had his whole life," said Runyon, a first-year student in the Class of 2017, "that's where I wanted to be."

Runyon's deep, abiding love for his father inspired a life's calling.

The youngest of four children, Runyon grew up in Boston, a few blocks away from Fenway Park, before moving to Concord, Mass. Runyon was raised on sports and the Red Sox, time with family and church on Sundays. And then he'd talk to his father. He was an older dad, but they got along very well.

"He would tell me about the cases he had when he got home in the evenings," Runyon said. "He was really the best there was. I just remember his demeanor when he treated his patients. He was a symbol of expertise."

But as much as Runyon had looked up to his father, he wasn't yet convinced that a life in medicine was in the cards for him. He enjoyed research and science, but as a teenager he thought of himself more as an engineer than a doctor. He went to Stanford University with a plan to major in mechanical engineering, but was only a few months into his freshman year when he began to question his path. Instead of taking the traditional four-year college route, he decided to take a leave of absence from Stanford and complete a two-year religious Mormon mission sharing the Gospel in France.

"It ended up being the most trying and happiest time of my life," said Runyon, who during his time in France also helped people with addiction, worked with immigrants and refugees, and taught English. "For the first time, it exposed me to things that were pretty hard that I had never faced. It was a really important, formative step for me." He thanks his father and his mother Lucia for their kindness and support all along the way.

While his mission opened his eyes to human struggles, Runyon's own challenge came when he returned from Europe. His dad started to forget things and became paranoid, and was in need of the same compassionate care he had provided to decades of patients. Diagnosed with vascular dementia, a condition characterized by brain damage from impaired flow to the brain and exacerbated by a history of heart disease, the elder Runyon quickly succumbed to his illness.

"This was a man who was in control his whole life," Runyon said. "He was the one who called the shots. And for three years I saw him lose that. I went from not being interested in medicine to wanting, at all costs, to preserve him and take care of him. More than that, I wanted to see what he did and how he took care of people and understand him more fully."

Runyon's experience opened his eyes to the health implications of aging for an increasingly older population. Experts estimate that there are 5 million Americans with Alzheimer's disease, a figure that will only rise as the baby boomer generation reaches its twilight years. Age-related diseases affect not just patients, but also their caregivers and loved ones.

Runyon returned to Stanford, combining his new-found passion for medicine and his interest in engineering in a bioengineering degree. He started investigating how various immune cell types respond to allergens and toxins, work that was ultimately published in PLOS ONE. During his summers in Boston he worked with Dr. Sekar Kathiresan at Massachusetts General Hospital and studied a protein associated with heart attack risk.

At 5 a.m. one morning during his senior year, Runyon got a call from his mother. He knew. His father had just died.

He graduated a few months later from Stanford in 2012 and finished a master's program in pharmacology at Cambridge University in England this spring.

Now he's learning medicine in the same classrooms, researching in the same labs, roaming the same hallways as Dr. Robert Chase Runyon did some 50 years ago.

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